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Sir: No one, Negro or white, will spend much of his life directly before the law; justice there is necessary but not sufficient for the individual human being who happens to be a Negro. It is in the tiny affairs of daily living that the individual needs to be treated as equal; as long as the average white Southerner feels set upon from without, he will take revenge on the Negro in those tiny affairs: the idle salesgirl who lets him stand unattended for five minutes; the white taxi driver who doesn't see him trying to flag a cab; the teacher who doesn't go out of his way to help a colored child; the service-station attendant who services everyone else's car before he gets around to the Negro's. The goal of reform should be fair treatment of everyone by everyone else, not simple unprejudiced treatment by a color-blind law. And this goal of voluntary equal treatment is national. TIME oversimplifies; the South participates in efforts to reach this goal in it as a part of the whole, not as a separate entity.
WILLIAM KEMP State College, Miss.
Who Does the Risking
Sir: Air safety is of intensely personal concern to me and to all other airline pilots. But we live within myriad rules and multiple pressures. For example, at New York's traffic-saturated Kennedy Airport, 8,400-ft. Runway 4R has been equipped and designated by the FAA as the main instrument runway. But 14,500-ft. Runway 13R, which provides the length today's jets need to land safely on wet surfaces, has no ILS (instrument landing system). This becomes especially inappropriate considering Kennedy Airport's frequent combination of very low ceilings and visibility with accompanying southeasterly surface winds. In theory, the pilot has the right to decide whether to land or not. However, chief pilots are frequently called upon by profit-conscious managements to question such decisions. While others in the aviation industry can be detached in weighing the economics and calculating the risks, the pilot can never forget that while others do the calculating, he and his passengers do the risking.
JOHN C. CARROLL Airline Captain Palos Verdes Estates, Calif.
Where to Get Off
Sir: I am the mother of one "kid" who would like to tell the airlines where to get oif. My son, a university student, on half-fare standby [April 22] from St. Louis to Atlanta, waited eight hours in St. Louis, then bought another ticket to Washington, D.C., where he waited four more hours, then bought another ticket to Atlanta, arriving home after nearly 24 hours in transit. Needless to say, by then "standby" was just a dirty word, and we purchased still another ticket for the return to school. I'm not too happy to learn that American Airlines has earned two million plus exploiting our kids.
(MRS.) ROSE R. GOLDMAN Decatur, Georgia
Here in Big D